Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) said he would be disappointed if he wasn’t asked to be former President Donald Trump’s vice president.
Vance gave an interview at his home with Fox News as part of a series of interviews with likely vice presidential candidates. Near the end of the interview, he was asked what would happen if he wasn’t picked to be vice president.
“You know, I’m human, right?” he replied. “So when you know this thing is a possibility, if it doesn’t happen, there is certainly going to be a little bit of disappointment. But I think the bigger thing is it’s such a cool thing to get to do the job that I do.”
Vance is widely seen as a top contender for the position, alongside Gov. Doug Burgum (R-ND) and Sen. Rick Scott (R-SC). As of Wednesday afternoon, the betting website Predict It currently has Vance as the second most likely candidate, behind Burgum.
He recently won a straw poll at the Turning Point USA Action conference about who should be Trump’s running mate, getting nearly three times the number of votes as the nearest competitor.
A top Republican strategist told Fox News Digital that Vance is “extremely popular” among Trump’s base and could help bring blue-collar voters away from President Joe Biden.
“He would be a lot of help across the entire Rust Belt and could help pick up working-class Democrat votes in places even outside his own state of Ohio,” the strategist said. “He would be an asset everywhere, really, but especially in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.”
Vance emphasized the support he could deliver for Trump in the interview.
The Ohio senator said a main avenue of Democratic attack is Republicans are insensitive toward black voters and the poor, but “they really can’t pull that with me, right, because I grew up in a poor family, and I was raised in a working-class community.”
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“I do think there is something just about my biography that makes it a little bit harder for these guys to attack me,” Vance said.
Trump has said he will announce his vice presidential pick before or at the Republican National Convention on July 15-18.
